


Dark Side of the Moon

by himitsutsubasa



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, Happy Ending, Original villain - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 14:28:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1391137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/himitsutsubasa/pseuds/himitsutsubasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack and Pitch might not be that different after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Side of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> I swear to... something. I have no idea where the original prompt is. I posted it to sometime ago and I lost the link and someone find it for me.

“North!” The hulking man tossed a shadow creature over the edge of his sleigh. 

Jack glanced over the edge in the direction of the swirling, golden vertex Sandy constructed. Bunnymund was around there somewhere. His colorful bombs stained the clouds pink and violet.

Whips and blades whirled about dismembering the monsters. The sound of clashing metal reached his ears. An unholy shriek erupted from the thing in front of him.

Tooth darted to his side, a flurry of color. Her eyes were wide and face tensed. “How many are there?”

Jack shook his head. He’d never seen anything like this in his travels. “What the hell are these things?”

Tooth looked at him for a moment before grimacing.

“I don’t know.” 

It wasn’t like Pitch’s dark sand; this was a deeper terror, one that only infected parts of the sand, but enough to strike fear and panic. It wasn’t fear. It was… something else entirely.

They stood back to back in the center of the mess. This was… the end?

Jack almost laughed. Because, this was it wasn’t it? The others didn’t know what it felt like to die. He knew though. He knew and he knew how easy it was to succumb, to let it be. He knew and he didn’t want to know that ever again. They would feel it for the first time, the feeling of disappearing. They would feel every fiber of their being scream in protest, their soul warp in torment and terror as they fell apart from the inside out.

“I see you’ve got a new one.”

A melodious voice, sweet like honey and twice as saccharine, burned his nose. 

Tooth cursed under her breath. “It’s her.”

Jack smacked a tainted sand dolphin across the nose. “Who?”

North bellowed at the center of the dark cloud that rose like fog around him. “Seline!” 

A pale figure stepped out of the fog. Dark hair tumbled around her neck and shoulders, rich rolling locks. Her lips were painted a garish red, the color of strawberries left out in the sun too long. Her dress was the same color, but a little darker and speckled with something darker. Her skin was pale ivory, like moonlight, and her smile was made of knives, like that of a shark’s. 

“Hello, North. Who is the new one?” She turned to Jack with a smirk. “Hello, darling. You are a pretty one aren’t you?” 

A tendril of smoke reached out to him, gracing his cheek with its slimy touch.

A boomerang sliced through it.

“Watch it ya bloody –,” Bunnymund started, rising to full height at the head of North’s sleigh.

Seline turned to him with a glare. “You are a rather presumptuous creature for a little rabbit.” 

Smoke swirled around him, twisting and curling. It bit into his fur, burrowing under it. Bunnymund let out a whimper at it closed around his neck and squeezed.

“I think you need to be re-adjusted.” She smiled wider and the smoke wrapped tighter, suffocating like a satin sheet.

Jack tapped his stick against the sled. Seline looked his way, amused like a cat with a new mouse. 

Jack looked over to Bunnymund and back. “I’m happy with this staying pg-13 and I’m pretty sure you will too.”

She raised a perfect eyebrow. “Oh? What are you going to do, little snowflake? Build a snow man?”

Jack stared hard at her as Bunnymund gasped harder. His legs jumped a little as he no longer had purchase on the sleigh. A few more moments and… who knew?

He drew on the winter air and the old ways that the earth had long forgotten. He drew on the songs that the birds sang, before humans had touched the sky. He drew on the powers of the ice he held lodged inside his chest, a heart of cold winter.

He drew on it and forced it into the air. 

In a moment, everything froze. 

The air, the sleigh, the wind, the smoke. 

He lined up this stick. 

She shattered into dust, turning into the smoke she created. She crumbled away, the look of surprise still on her face. 

Then time moved again. They breathed again. 

North stared at the dissipating cloud in shock. Tooth looked on with horror. Bunnymund hacked and coughed, searching for air. Sandy caught Bunnymund as he fell and turned to Jack, a look of surprise on his face. 

Bunnymund looked up. “What was that, frost bite?”

Jack breathed and vanished on the wind.

* * *

“Jack…” Bunnymund settled down beside him on the bank of the pond. It was summer now, and the lake Jack had died in melted. At the very bottom, buried under hundreds of years of earth, was a boy. Bunnymund looked to his left at the person perched on the tree beside him. Hundreds of years out in the open air had made the boy a man.

“Ya never answered my question.”

Jack cradled his shepherd’s crook in his arms. “It’s… It’s like cracking things. I… I broke a lot of stuff… but not people and now I…”

Bunnymund huddled closer. Jack was cold, even for a winter spirit. He wrapped his paws around the thin, human arms. “What?”

Jack leaned his head back, looking up, baring his throat, submissive for once in his life. “I thought you wouldn’t accept me.” He closed his eyes and laughed bitterly.

“After it all, I’m just like Pitch, a murderer.”

Bunnymund touched Jack’s forehead with his nose. They saw eye to eye. “No, you aren’t.”

“Now I am… She’s…”

Bunnymund rubbed his paw in a comforting circle on Jack’s stomach. “Seline doesn’t die. She’s the dark side of the moon. She can’t die.”

Jack’s eyes widened, reflecting the soft golden light of the sun that filtered through the leaved above their heads. “Do you mean that we still have to fight her?”

Bunnymund thought for a moment. “She doesn’t side with good or evil. She just likes to play.”

“Play?” Jack asked incredulously.

In all his years, he had never seen her get as close to injuring someone as then. But, he still felt how carefully the smoke had wrapped around him, enough to scare, but never to kill. “She is quite the prankster and she never takes anything personally. In fact, I think she might take this as a chance to start a prank war.”

Jack smirked. “I’ll be ready for her then.”

Bunnymund nuzzled into the side of Jack’s neck. 

“Come on. Let’s go home.”


End file.
